


Gingersnap

by stillscape



Category: Archie Comics & Related Fandoms, Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - After College/University, Alternate Universe - Roommates/Housemates, Christmas, F/M, oh my god they were roommates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-13
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-02-14 11:04:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 15,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13006440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stillscape/pseuds/stillscape
Summary: Her costume is green. She wears green velvet knickers, a forest green velvet smock, and a perky little hat decorated with spangles. The costume is sized to fit, in theory, everyone; this means it fits, in reality, no one.Except Betty Cooper.The costume looksreally goodon Betty Cooper.Grinch though he may be,determined not to acknowledge or act upon any inappropriate feelings he might have developed for his roommatethough he may be, Jughead Jones finds himself liking the holiday season just a little bit more every day.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sylwrites](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sylwrites/gifts).



> Happy holidays, Syl! I took two of your prompts and kind of mashed them together. 
> 
> (With apologies to [David Sedaris](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/47/transcript).)

Her costume is green. She wears green velvet knickers, a forest green velvet smock, and a perky little hat decorated with spangles. The costume is sized to fit, in theory, everyone; this means it fits, in reality, no one. 

Except Betty Cooper. 

The costume looks _really good_ on Betty Cooper. 

Grinch though he may be, _determined not to acknowledge or act upon any inappropriate feelings he might have developed for his roommate_ though he may be, Jughead Jones finds himself liking the holiday season just a little bit more every day. 

This is _before_ he accidentally sees her naked.

  
  
  
  


They move in to the two-bedroom, fifth-floor walkup at the beginning of August, sweltering heat making each and every trip up the stairs absolutely miserable. It’s so hot he’s left his hat on the kitchen counter. That’s how hot it is. 

“You could have hired movers,” Veronica points out. But Jughead’s transitioning from broke college student to broke grad student, Betty’s entry-level salary is good only in the sense that it could be worse, and they have Archie to help with the heaviest furniture. 

“We can do it ourselves,” says his new roommate, who tucks a stray, sweaty wisp of hair back under the red bandana tied around her head and heads resolutely back to the U-Haul. 

There’s something in Betty’s eye as she heads for the stairs with yet another box of books, something cold and determined, that suggests to Jughead she would want to do this herself no matter the economic circumstances. 

Veronica raises an eyebrow at Jughead, who shrugs and tries to wipe the sweat from his own brow with a shirtsleeve. Since he’s wearing only an undershirt, it doesn’t quite work as planned. 

“Her ass is kicking yours right now, Jones.” 

He shoots Veronica a half-annoyed glare before grabbing a box of his own, and catches up with Betty on the second-floor landing. 

Jughead doesn’t know Betty very well. They’ve met quite a few times over their college years despite attending different schools, connected as they are by the social web that is Veronica and Archie’s convoluted relationship, and conversed just enough that the prospect of having her as a roommate proved intriguing rather than off-putting—though of course some of that is attributable to general relief over finding _anyone_ with whom to split expenses, after Archie had so abruptly gotten the offer to go on tour with the Pussycats. He assumes Betty’s enthusiasm for the apartment, for moving in with him, can be attributed to a similar sense of relief; Betty’s one of _those_ people, one of the unlucky ones who’d had a perfectly decent studio snatched out from under her last-minute when the landlord realized it was possible to squeeze an extra $300 a month out of the place. 

At the very least, he knows the following things about her: she’s not a serial killer, she’s not fond of raucous parties, she’s smart as hell, and—judging by the label on the box he’s carrying right now—she shares his penchant for true crime novels. 

Her ass is more or less right in front of him now, headed up to the third floor in a pair of worn, faded denim shorts. 

Not thinking about Betty’s ass may prove to be more of a struggle than he’d like.

  
  
  
  


The apartment door opens and shuts, and Jughead looks up from their battered old couch to see her standing at the coat rack, still bundled up in her pink coat, her cheeks equally pink from the wind outside. 

“This is my work uniform,” she says, holding up a wire hanger. Dangling from the hanger is a solid green mass of heavy fabric, looking distorted and warped from the dry cleaner’s plastic in which it’s been encased. The hat on her head is not her usual soft blue beret, the one he suspects might be cashmere; it’s not her less usual white cable-knit cap, either. Today’s hat is a Peter Pan-like affair rendered in a vibrant, Kermit the Frog green, patterned with gold stars, and stuck through with a candy cane instead of a feather. 

Jughead takes this all in for a moment. “So you’re really going to be an elf?” 

Betty doesn’t answer at first, but her familiar making-the-best-of-it grin is firmly in place as she drapes the costume over the back of the couch. 

“You know what they say; when one door closes, another opens,” she says, eventually, as she slips out of her coat and hangs it on the rack. “It’s just that this door is made of candy canes.” 

There were extenuating circumstances, of course; no one really _wanted_ to be a Macy’s elf. In the second week of November, she’d been laid off, the victim of downsizing after the indie journalism site for which she’d been working since graduation six months ago was abruptly swallowed by a much larger entity. Betty had landed a new _real_ job almost at once, but one with a catch—she would not begin until the new year. 

“And you’ll appreciate it when I’ll be able to afford my share of the rent,” she says. “Not to mention ingredients for holiday baking.” 

Under his own much-less-festive hat, Jughead’s ears perk up. “Touché, Ms. Cooper.” 

“Gingersnap.” 

For a moment, Jughead wonders if those are the first item on the baking agenda, but then Betty walks back to the couch, picks up the costume, and points to a nametag he hadn’t noticed before. 

“My elf name is Gingersnap.”

  
  
  
  


“There are so many kinds of elves you can be.” 

The words are a little muffled, coming as they do in between mouthfuls of lo mein. Her feet are pulled up on the couch, giving Jughead the odd sensation that he is being watched and judged by her seasonally appropriate slippers, which look like penguins and have little beady eyes. Literally, their eyes are little beads. 

Today was her first day of training, and she arrived back at the apartment exhausted and ravenous, her green eyes widening with relief when she discovered Jughead had already ordered takeout for both of them and it would be arriving in fifteen minutes. Though she hadn’t had to wear the elf costume today, she’d wanted to shower and change immediately—something about eight hours in the bowels of Macy’s made her feel, in her own diplomatic words, _kinda gross_. 

“It’s insane. I mean, I guess it’s not insane, but I never really thought about it before.” 

“Like what?” Elves are elves, he thinks; it’s not as though they’re actually making toys at Macy’s. 

“Cash register elf, photo elf, Santa’s helper elf—”

“Aren’t all elves Santa’s helpers?” 

“Well, yeah, technically,” she says, “but I mean the Santas that are actually in the store on any given day. Like, someone has to get them water and Kleenex and stuff.” 

“Oh.” 

She rattles off a host of other elf positions, most of which are very literally the thing you’re positioned next to for most of the day. Escalator elves, train elves, giant train set elves. 

“So which kind of elf are you shooting for?” he asks, and Betty shrugs into her cardboard container. 

“Everyone cycles through most of them eventually,” she says. “The people that have done this before, they say you go crazy if you have to stand in the same spot delivering the same lines for forty hours a week.” 

This makes perfect sense to Jughead. Morbid curiosity kicking in, he asks, “What kinds of lines do they give you?” 

“Oh, you know. Lots of variations on ‘What are you planning to ask Santa for this year?’ or ‘What’s your favorite Christmas carol?’” 

Jughead pushes the last egg roll towards her, but she shakes her head and pushes it back. 

“I’m good. But thanks for having dinner ready when I got home tonight. You didn’t have to do that.” 

He shrugs. “No problem. I was ordering for myself anyway, so.” 

“I used the last of my cash for lunch today, but I’ll pay you back tomorrow.” 

Surviving as he is on a graduate teaching assistant stipend, Jughead’s hardly flush with cash himself, but he finds himself waving her off. “Don’t worry about it,” he says. “It’s not like I haven’t eaten enough of your food.”

  
  
  
  


About six weeks after they move in together, Betty asks him what he thinks is possibly the only stupid question she’s ever asked in her life. 

“This is working out, right?” she says over coffee one morning, her brows uncharacteristically knitted together. “This living situation? I’m not a terrible roommate?” 

Betty pays rent early, keeps the common areas tidy, contributes precisely half of their communal coffee supply even though Jughead’s sure he drinks three-quarters of it. She has yet to bring over a noisy overnight visitor, or indeed _any_ overnight visitor, and cleans each and every long, blonde hair from the shower drain each and every morning. 

“You’re seriously asking me that?” 

She nods, and Jughead finds himself half-chuckling into his coffee. 

“Betts,” he says, the nickname-of-a-nickname something wholly unplanned on his part, “you’re a _perfect_ roommate.” 

The fingers of her right hand tighten into a loose fist, and she stares into her coffee mug. “I hate that word,” she mutters, so softly he almost can’t hear. 

“Roommate?” 

Betty looks up at him, green eyes wide in surprise, like she hadn’t meant to say anything out loud. “No. _Perfect_.” 

“Duly noted.” He takes another sip of coffee, thinks for a moment, and puts the mug down. “How about 'adequate'? You’re an adequate roommate.” 

For reasons known only to herself, this makes Betty laugh.

  
  
  
  


He’s waist deep in a pile of undergraduate essays that he definitely should have finished grading by now when he’s mercifully distracted by a light tap on his bedroom door. 

“Come in?” he says, only half-consciously adding the question mark; in the couple of months since they became roommates, he’s not sure Betty has entered his bedroom. Thankfully, he’s not one to leave dirty underwear laying around. Dirty coffee cups, yes, but not dirty underwear. 

Betty tentatively pushes the door open and steps through. “Hey. Um, I was just wondering… what are you doing for Thanksgiving?” 

“Might buy some cranberry relish to put on a turkey sandwich. Why?” 

“You’re not going home?” 

He finishes scribbling a comment in the margin, puts down his red pen, and looks up to see that Betty’s eyes are red-rimmed and a little puffy. 

They’ve talked a little about home, what it means to each of them, but in truth, he’s let Betty do most of the talking. He knows home for her is a small town about as far upstate as it’s possible to go without hitting Canada, a ridiculously idyllic-sounding small town with a picturesque river running through it, a small town whose primary industry, if Betty is to be believed, is maple syrup. There’s a picture of her parents’ house on their fridge, a comfortable white two-story with a red door and big trees in the yard. The Coopers are in the yard too, all seven of them—Betty, her parents, her sister, her brother-in-law, her baby niece and nephew. If you called Sears Roebuck in the 1950s and asked for the best possible American family they had in stock, you’d receive the Coopers in the mail two weeks later. 

Or so Jughead had thought, until he met Mrs. Cooper for all of an hour earlier in the fall, and understood at once why the seemingly perfect girl in his apartment moved in with a stack of meditation guides, six bottles of aromatherapy oil blends promising relaxation and mental clarity, and two anti-anxiety prescriptions. 

(He’s never snooped. Betty’s left her pills out on the bathroom sink a few times, is all.) 

“Toledo’s a little far for just the weekend,” he says, not offering more information. And then—more cautiously, though he senses she wants him to ask— “Aren’t you?” 

“Elves have to work Black Friday.” She sniffles once, quickly swiping at her eyes with the sleeve of the oversized Columbia hoodie in which she’s encased. “I won’t have time to get back here, not unless I drive in the middle of the night. And since I don’t have a car, well…” 

Jughead catches a glimpse of her cell phone, clutched tightly in one hand, and puts two and two together. “Did your mom freak out or something?” 

“She’ll get over it,” Betty mutters. She sniffles again. 

Without thinking about it, Jughead grabs the roll of toilet paper that’s been on his desk since his discussion section so thoughtfully passed whatever was going around the NYU dorms a couple of weeks ago, and stands up to hand it to her. Without thinking about it, he takes the three steps over to Betty. And when she takes half a step closer to _him_ , her body angling slightly towards his, he sort of, kind of, offers her a hug—again, without thinking. 

She hesitates for a moment, seemingly as surprised by this development as he is, before tentatively wrapping her arms around him. 

As she squeezes harder, arches her upper back into the hand he’s placed between her shoulders, drops her head to his chest, Jughead starts thinking. 

He starts thinking he’s doomed.

  
  
  
  


“There’s no one from your program you want to invite?” 

“I don’t really know any of them all that well.” 

A well-worn copy of _The Joy of Cooking_ lands, with a thump, on the coffee table in front of him. A moment later, Betty lands on the other end of the couch. 

“So you’ll get to know them better.” 

“Have you been to parties with grad students, Betty? They’re going to show up drunk, get drunker, and start arguing about poststructuralism. It’s not a great time.” 

Betty raises an impish (elfish?) eyebrow. She’s not in any part of the costume right now, but the spangled hat is visible behind her, hanging from its usual spot on the coat rack. “Just the two of us, then, I guess.” 

“You’re not inviting anyone?” 

“No,” she sighs. “I mean, I did, but everyone I know has plans already.” 

“Yeah, this is kind of last-minute,” Jughead says. “So…just the two of us.” 

They go grocery shopping together on Wednesday, after his sparsely attended seminar and her half-day of elf training. As with any Wednesday-before-Thanksgiving grocery shopping experience, it’s best left unexamined—aside, perhaps, from the moment in which a very angry shopper rams her cart into Betty’s rear end, sending Betty flying across the produce section and, coincidentally, right into Jughead. 

In what is perhaps the smoothest move Jughead has ever made, he catches her. 

“Oof,” Betty mutters, straightening herself up. She’s braced herself against his chest, and it’s definitely his imagination that she stays there for a moment or two longer than strictly necessary. 

It is _not_ Jughead’s imagination that Betty Cooper is exactly the right size to catch. 

“You okay?” He’s prepared to throw a bag of cranberries at the offending woman’s head, or at least to glare righteously at her, but she’s already disappeared into the throng. 

“Yeah, I’m fine. Might have a bruise on my ass tomorrow, that’s all.” She swipes briefly at the seat of her jeans, twisting around to check for dirt; there isn’t any. “Not that anyone’s going to notice. Okay, so… two people, we want about three days of leftovers, one of the people is you. How many potatoes do you think we should we get?”

  
  
  
  


They pass a man dressed as a hot dog while they’re walking back to their apartment, and—a block later—another man dressed as a taco. Both are handing out leaflets, or coupon books, or something. Betty says “No thank you” and hustles past each of them, shooting Jughead a curious look when he accepts the leaflets and tucks them carefully into his reusable grocery bags. 

“It breaks my heart to see a grown man dressed as a taco,” he says, shrugging. 

A little smile plays at the corners of Betty’s mouth. 

“Jughead Jones,” she says, somehow infusing his name with cinnamon and sugar. “You _do_ have a soft spot.” 

He swallows, his mouth and throat suddenly unbearably dry. “Sure,” he says. “For food.” 

They walk another block. 

“Will it break your heart to see me dressed as an elf?” 

_Possibly_ , he thinks, _but not in the same way_. 

“That’s different. You’ll be in Santa’s Village with all the other elves… and millions of children. Not quite as sad as being a giant French fry alone on a street corner.”

Ever so slightly, Betty’s smile pales.

  
  
  
  


On Thursday morning, Jughead wakes up late to the soundtrack of _A Charlie Brown Christmas_ and all sorts of delicious smells, and drifts into the kitchen upon them, like a cartoon character beholden to a freshly baked pie. Unsurprisingly, it turns out, a freshly baked pie is _exactly_ what smells so good. 

“Oh, good, you’re up,” Betty says, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. The Macy’s parade plays on their living room TV, sound muted. “Here, you can start tearing the stuffing bread into cubes.” 

Their kitchen—or really, the six square feet of floor space advertised as a kitchen—is barely big enough for one person to work, let alone two. And yet...

“What does your family usually do for Thanksgiving, Jughead?” 

“Not much.” Truth be told, he hasn’t been back for Thanksgiving since he left for college. “No one in my family really cooks, so we don’t make a big deal out of it.” 

He has the feeling that Betty has never encountered StoveTop stuffing, a store-bought pumpkin pie, or a year without anything to say you’re thankful for. 

They sit down to eat mid-afternoon. Betty starts her Christmas music playlist over from the beginning and proclaims all of her cooking inferior to her mother’s, sighing at the gravy—the gravy they haven’t even tasted yet—in such a way that he believes her to be sincerely lamenting her shortcomings, not fishing for compliments. 

“Do you want a glass of wine?” She holds up the bottle she’d opened to deglaze the roasting pan. “I know you don’t usually drink, but... special occasion?” 

He should call the jail tonight or tomorrow, he knows. For now, though, he throws caution just the slightest bit to the wind, banking on the hope that he is not, in fact, his father. 

“Sure,” he says. “Why not.” 

Betty pours two glasses and joins him at the corner table, the general tininess of which is already forcing a kind of intimacy that ought to be uncomfortable, but isn’t, somehow, at all. 

“Cheers,” she says, and they clink. 

In truth, the turkey _is_ a little on the dry side, the gravy slightly too salty. Thanks to the size of their kitchen, everything came out of the oven at such different times that all the food is wildly different temperatures. 

It’s still the best Thanksgiving meal he’s ever had. 

“How is everything?” 

Betty’s given him a bit of a head start, not that he noticed until now. Her fork hovers, hesitantly, over a chunk of sweet potato. The table is so small that their knees almost touch underneath it; if he thought even for a second that Betty wanted that kind of reassurance, it would be easy, so easy, to put his hand on her thigh, or even to lean over and kiss her… 

But she is his roommate. Just his roommate. 

He swallows a bite of stuffing. 

“It’s adequate. It’s an adequate Thanksgiving dinner.” 

Betty smiles, almost shyly, into her cranberry sauce. 

“Well, I’m glad it’s only adequate,” she says, looking up at him through her impossibly long lashes. “Otherwise, you might eat all the leftovers before I get home from work tomorrow.”

  
  
  
  


(to be continued…)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I seemed to be filled with more Christmas spirit than I thought, because despite not embarking on actual writing until I had a complete outline, I have nevertheless expanded my plans from two to three chapters. 
> 
> This story is a mashup of two prompts from sylwrites--"roommates; one sees the other naked" and "first Christmas/holiday season (as a couple, either in a new house, or as parents, or something)"--and David Sedaris's ["SantaLand Diaries"](https://www.npr.org/2016/12/23/506475364/a-holiday-tradition-david-sedaris-reads-santaland-diaries), one of my all-time favorite pieces of writing. If you have neither read nor listened to his essay before...you should.

Her skin is pale. She has long slender legs, perfectly curved hips, and two perky—

Jughead forces himself to stop there. 

It’s bad enough that he’s walked through the front door of their apartment and into its short hallway at the exact moment his roommate has walked through the _bathroom_ door of their apartment and into its short hallway. This would normally not be a problem, of course. But then again, Betty would normally not be dripping water all over the hallway. 

Betty would normally be _dressed_. 

For half a second, half a second that plays much longer in Jughead’s mind, Betty’s eyes fix on his. Hers are wide, with a hint of horror. His… well, he manages to grab hold of himself and avert them, thank god. 

“I forgot my towel!” Betty gasps, just as Jughead starts apologizing incoherently to the crown molding. She disappears into her room, and he retreats to his own, nearly wiping out in the small puddle of water she’s left on their old wooden floor. 

There’s something almost comical about his close call. Jughead can admit as much to himself—even now, as he lays on his back with his eyes squeezed tightly shut, trying to will the image of a naked Betty Cooper from his mind. 

The day had been such a _good_ one, too, up to this point. It’s December 18th, the day he’s barely had time to look forward to. Today Jughead made his final trek to campus for the year, swapped the stack of undergraduate essays he’s spent the last four days grading for the marked versions of the papers he himself turned in four days earlier. 

He hadn’t been too worried about his own grades, having gleaned that so long as you did the work, it was usually harder _not_ to get As or A-minuses once you made it to grad school. But he had been worried about the _comments_ , so worried he couldn’t even bring himself to read them in the department office. He’d glanced through them on the train home, though, and… well, “pleasantly surprising” isn’t a phrase Jughead usually gets to use in regards to his own life, but he’s yet to think of a better one. 

What Betty Cooper looks like naked is not pleasantly surprising. Pleasant, yes. Surprising, no. 

( _Not_ that he is in the habit of imagining what his roommate looks like naked. That would be very, very wrong.) 

He wonders what the appropriate length of time to stay hidden in his room is, decides the best and most mature way to handle this situation is to invade the common space and thus force Betty to make the decision, and thus opens his bedroom door at the precise moment she opens hers. 

She is very much dressed now, fully dressed, in jeans and the least form-fitting sweater he’s ever seen her wear. 

“I’ll just…” Betty says, gesturing rather broadly, and he realizes she’s clutching a towel. 

He takes a step back into his own room, muttering “Right, right,” as she goes to mop up the puddle. 

They do not speak of this incident. 

They barely speak at all for the next four days.

  
  
  
  


As November fades into December, as the Thanksgiving leftovers in their fridge are demolished and replaced with half-eaten takeout, Jughead realizes that he and Betty are no longer just roommates. They’ve become, somewhat inexplicably, _friends_. He ponders the shift at odd moments, the fact of Betty’s friendship popping into his brain while he’s drifting off to sleep or zoning out at the library. 

One of the most perplexing things about Betty Cooper is that she doesn’t seem to have very many friends—or, at least, she doesn’t seem to have very many close ones. Veronica, of course, even though the Pussycats tour means Veronica’s been out of town for months. Her sister, too, but Polly (understandably busy, what with her infant twins) hasn’t visited even once. 

This must be Betty’s choice, he supposes—the relative lack of social engagement—because he simply cannot imagine a world in which anyone who meets Betty wouldn’t be beating down doors to be her friend. 

(Except him. But then, he’s weird that way. Also, he’s Betty’s roommate and therefore possesses a key to the apartment, freeing him from the necessity of breaking down the door.) 

She taps at his bedroom door one evening. “Jughead?” 

“Yeah?” 

The door opens, and Jughead’s room immediately fills with the scent of vanilla. Betty takes in the preposterous mess that is Jughead’s desk, and flinches. 

“Sorry! I didn’t mean to interrupt your work.” 

“It’s okay,” he says. It really is; he’s been staring at this paper for three hours straight and has written approximately six sentences in that time. Copious notes, yes; observations, yes; ideas for two short stories he doesn’t have time to write, yes. But very little paper. 

Betty steps into the room, holding out her phone to him. “Veronica just sent me this. The tour’s in Toledo right now.” 

When he sees the screen, his throat constricts just a little. Squeezed into a selfie with Veronica, the other Pussycats, and Archie are quite a few familiar faces—people Jughead recognizes from high school, mostly the jocks he never liked much but nevertheless tolerated. Then there’s Fred Andrews—practically his second father—whom Jughead recognizes as having dressed up for the occasion, in that his flannel shirt is buttoned and tucked in. And there, half-hidden behind Fred… 

Jughead zooms in. 

“That’s your sister, right? J.B.?”

He nods. He’s mentioned her to Betty, but only once or twice. “I’m kind of shocked she went to a Pussycats concert. She’s usually too cool for pop.” 

“Well, backstage passes are backstage passes,” Betty reasons. 

He hands the phone back to her. “That, and she’s always kind of had a crush on Archie.” 

Betty smiles. “Yeah, that makes sense.” 

“If you ever meet her, don’t tell her I told you. She doesn’t think I know.” 

“Oh, sneaky of you,” Betty says, her eyes sparkling. “What’d you do, read her diary?” 

“No, just… it’s not that hard to recognize heart eyes. She was always trying to tag along with us.” 

“And you let her, didn’t you.” 

“Sometimes.” As much as he could, honestly, because—well, because it was usually a better option than leaving her at home. 

“Well, I hope I get to meet her someday,” Betty says. “I’ll let you get back to work now.” 

Just before she closes the bedroom door, Jughead blurts out, “Are those cookies I smell?” 

Betty’s eyes crinkle in confusion for a moment. “Cookies? No…” Comprehension dawns. “Scented candle.” 

“Oh,” he mutters, a little embarrassed. “Right.” 

When his growling stomach forces him from his bedroom ninety minutes and five hundred words later, he finds his roommate taking a pan of brownies out of the oven. 

“Give them a few minutes to cool off,” she says.

Jughead sits at their tiny table anyway, pushing the chair back far enough so he can cross one ankle over his knee. “You know you didn’t have to, right?” 

“Don’t get too excited. They’re from a box.” 

“Ah,” Jughead says. “Just like Mom used to make.” She snickers at that, and Jughead decides not to inform her that he wasn’t joking.

  
  
  
  


The brownies are Betty’s first foray into holiday baking, and—as it turns out—her only one for the next few weeks. It seems there’s something about spending eight hours a day as an elf that drains even her Christmas spirit. 

“I was a Magic Window Elf today,” she informs Jughead one evening. “That’s the window you go to if you just want to see Santa from a distance, you know, and not actually take a picture.” 

Jughead swallows his bite of sandwich and lifts an eyebrow at Betty. “You can watch other people’s kids take pictures with Santa through a hole in the wall?” Something about this seems off to him. 

She nods. “So I stand there and I say ‘Step on the magic star and you can see Santa!’ I was there for less than fifteen minutes before a fifty-year-old woman told me I looked stupid.” 

“I had a student cry at the end of my discussion section this afternoon because she didn’t get a good grade on last week’s pop quiz.”

“Aww,” Betty says, her expression suddenly sympathetic. “Were you nice to her?” 

“I had no idea how to react, honestly.” He almost winces at the memory of the girl’s tear-streaked face. She’d looked like she wanted a hug, but that was strictly forbidden—and he wasn’t quite in the mood to reassure her anyway, considering why she’d gotten the bad grade in the first place. “It’s not my fault she clearly didn’t do any of the reading the quiz was on.” 

Betty drops into the chair across from him, places her mug of tea on the table, and fights back a smile. “Hard-ass,” she says, and then, “Was she cute?” 

“What’s that got to do with anything?” 

“I knew a girl who cried to her TAs all the time. Her male TAs, I should say. She was flirting for better grades, basically.” 

At this—a possibility Jughead had not even remotely considered—he winces for real, which causes Betty to lose her battle against smiling. 

“She _was_ flirting with you.” 

Jughead finds he can’t look at his roommate anymore.

  
  
  
  


Even before he’s at their door, Jughead can hear the voice from inside their apartment. 

“Oh, my god, Gingersnap, this mulled wine is amazing. Why don’t you have a boyfriend again?” 

It’s a male voice. But as soon as Jughead enters the living area, he realizes it really was a question (and, he thinks, a very good one), not a roundabout way of asking Betty out. 

He realizes this because there are two men on the couch with Betty—one a sort of upper-middle-class preppy, another he can’t see clearly enough to stereotype yet—and they are _very_ clearly already involved with each other. Which, Jughead reminds himself, doesn’t necessarily mean that one, the other, or both of them aren’t interested in Betty too, just… his instinct tells him that’s not the case. 

Betty sits up a little straighter, flashes him a rather broad smile. “Hi, Jughead,” she says, and the preppy guy snorts. 

“Your roommate has an elf name?” 

“Sure,” Jughead says, as amiably as possible. It has, as Fred Andrews would say, been a day. It’s after nine o’clock, he hasn’t eaten dinner yet, and there are another hundred pages he really ought to read before he goes to bed tonight. 

“ _And_ he wears a dumb hat. Oh, Gingersnap, he’s adorable.” 

For some reason, Betty blushes. “Kevin!” she says, laughing a little. 

“ _Snowball_ ,” says Kevin, reproachfully. 

“Fine. Jughead, this is Snowball and…” She purses her lips together, clearly trying to refrain from laughing harder. “Jingle Jangle.” 

“Joaquin,” clarifies the other guy. 

“There’s half a pizza left if you want any,” Betty says. “And mulled wine.” 

Though Jughead initially stays in the living area only for the pizza (he ignores the mulled wine, nice though it smells), he soon finds himself oddly fascinated with Betty’s elf coworkers, and the obvious affection between them. His fascination has nothing to do with the fact that they’re both men and everything to do with the fact that he recognizes Joaquin—not literally; Jughead knows they’ve never met before. No, he recognizes himself in Joaquin, can see Joaquin as a sort of kindred spirit. Jughead _knows_ , somehow, that Joaquin’s past is every bit as dark and messy as his own. 

The large tattoo on the side of Joaquin’s neck might have something to do with that. Jughead’s not exactly an expert on cover-ups, but he’d be willing to bet all the remaining pizza that what now appears to be some sort of abstracted phoenix once proclaimed a gang affiliation. 

“They let you be an elf with that?” he asks, gesturing at Joaquin’s neck. He wouldn’t normally ask, but although Jughead is tattoo-free, doesn’t have any blatant visual marks declaring his childhood a hard knock one, he has the sensation Joaquin can read his past without them. 

Joaquin shrugs. “Sure. I just have to wear a scarf inside.” 

“It’s the worst scarf,” Kevin says immediately. “It’s _acrylic_.” 

Kevin immediately launches into a description of the Christmas gift he’s already given his boyfriend—a nicer scarf, a cashmere one—but neither the floor manager nor Kevin will let Joaquin wear it during work hours, the manager because it’s not part of the official costume and Kevin because he’s seen too many small children vomit on too many elves. Vomit does not wash out of cashmere, according to Kevin, a fact Jughead had never before thought about but could have guessed well enough without being told. 

They’re a very odd couple, but they very clearly work. 

It gives Jughead something to think about, anyway.

  
  
  
  


“I just wish this apartment had a decent bathtub.”

She’s on the phone with Veronica, clearly unaware that Jughead is home—even though he’s starting to feel like he’s always at home, always under a pile of books and Xeroxed journal articles and half-graded undergrad papers.

“V, I was on my feet for ten hours today at work alone, plus the commute, plus I had to stop for groceries—no, look, I can’t afford to live on takeout—and now I have to actually cook something. I haven’t started any of my Christmas shopping. I don’t even want to hear the word ‘Christmas’ until—”

Even though Jughead is in his bedroom, with the door shut, he’s pretty sure he can hear Betty’s eyes rolling.

“I’ve heard ‘Wonderful Christmastime’ twenty-two times in the past four days, Veronica…yeah, we do _have_ a bathtub. It’s just not very big.”

Jughead reaches for his headphones, but doesn’t quite get them on before Betty hammers another nail into his coffin.

“Well, you’re the expert on getting hot guys to give you massages. Tell me how to find one, will you?”

Gritting his teeth, Jughead pops the headphones into place and starts up a Spotify playlist.

  
  
  
  


He attends the department holiday party partially out of obligation, partially because he’s right there anyway, and partially because free food has been promised, and spends most of his time wandering from buffet table to buffet table, trying not to enter into too many conversations. Even without the aid of alcohol, three of his cohort members break into an argument about poststructuralism before Jughead manages to reach the dessert table. 

The sky is dark when he leaves the party, but the night is still fairly young. Snow started falling last night, and what was a mere dusting this morning has turned into a decent accumulation. Even New York City manages to smell like firewood during the first snowfall of the winter, and even Jughead has to admit it’s all a little bit magical. 

He ducks into a coffee shop, more because he wants something to keep his hands warm than he wants the caffeine. Upon exiting the coffee shop, he pauses for a moment before heading in the opposite direction of his apartment. 

It’s about a mile and a half to Macy’s and he’s probably not dressed warmly enough, but he decides to walk it anyway. This is the kind of New York night he loves most: not too rushed, not too busy, but still full of people. It’s impossible to stand out in New York, but it’s also impossible to fit in. Jughead relishes the feeling of being what he can only describe as human marginalia, an observational side note in hundreds of thousands simultaneous stories. 

His feet—numb with cold, a little bit wet—carry him faithfully to Macy’s. There is only one reason for him to be here, and that’s to purchase a box of the mint chocolates that are only sold at Macy’s, the ones J.B. mentioned their mom’s been reminiscing about from childhood. There’s a Macy’s in Toledo, of course, but he has no better ideas for what to get his mom, so he might as well pick up the chocolates now and get it crossed off his list. 

Finding the Frangos is accomplished easily enough. He can barely turn around without knocking into a display of either them or the Godivas, which is good, because Macy’s at Christmas is an assault on every single one of his senses. The air smells like fake pine, literally every surface seems to be covered in tinsel, and “Wonderful Christmastime” is either twenty minutes long or playing on a loop. He buys exactly one box of chocolates, which, again, was all he came to do. 

He checks his phone—it’s a quarter to nine—and heads to the escalators. 

Five minutes later, Jughead enters SantaLand. 

He hopes no one ever asks him what he thinks of it, because even he would have to admit that it’s all pretty breathtaking. That’s his first thought. His second is that he feels bad for whoever has to take all this stuff down and put it away at the end of the season. 

“Reservation time?” asks a female elf, who’s suddenly right in front of him, and entirely too cheerful considering the time of day and the fact that “Wonderful Christmastime” is still blasting through the speakers. 

“Huh?” 

“What’s your reservation time?” 

Jughead looks down at the elf, whose nametag reads “Holly,” and wonders if that’s actually just her real name. Betty had said, at the beginning of her training, that some of the elves really did seem to live every day like it was Christmas. He’d chuckled, at the time. 

“Oh, I’m just…” 

“You need a reservation to see Santa this year,” says Holly. Jughead blinks. 

“Jughead,” calls a voice behind him, and he turns around to see one of Betty’s friends. 

“Hey, Kev—er, _Snowball_.” 

“Good catch. Holly, he’s with me. Come hither.” With that, Jughead finds himself being taken by the elbow and marched off to winter wonderlands unknown. 

“I really just came to look around—” 

Snowball, or Kevin, or whatever, tuts at him. “Your roommate’s off work in ten minutes. Be a gentleman and wait for her.” 

“Where are we going?” 

“To see Santa,” Kevin says. “And Gingersnap. She’s a photo elf today. Come on, see Santa. It’s not even busy tonight; a lot of people canceled after the snow picked up.” 

He’s led around one corner and then another, past giant candy canes and even bigger toy train sets, past teddy bears and dolls and gingerbread men, all of it coated in sparkly faux snow, until they make a final turn and Jughead finds himself—for the first time in his life, he’s pretty sure—face to face with the man himself. 

Well, almost. He’s close enough to see Santa, but he’s still third in line. 

Kevin turns to Jughead and places a hand on each of his shoulders. “Don’t move a muscle,” he warns, before ducking into a hidden side door. A minute or two later, Betty steps out of the same door. 

He’s never seen her in the elf costume. 

The green velvet knickers looked goofy on Holly and goofier still on Kevin; on Betty, they somehow cling just right to her hips. The tunic nips in at the smallest part of her waist, and its deep forest green is just the right shade to bring out the color of her eyes. These eyes appear to be creased with exhaustion, frankly, but she nevertheless steps out from behind the Christmas tree blocking the door with a giant smile on her face—one Jughead hasn’t seen since that fateful day in summer when the formidable Mrs. Cooper had paid them a visit. 

She takes in the line, and when she registers who’s standing at the end of it, the smile fades away completely. 

“Juggie,” she says, her voice quiet. The smile reappears, smaller and softer this time, as she clasps her hands in front of her chest. “Did you come to sit on Santa’s lap?” 

It is possible, Jughead thinks, that he may be just the _tiniest_ bit smitten. 

With his roommate. 

This is the only logical explanation for what happens next, after the final two families have cleared out and he’s ushered into Santa’s inner circle. It is not, in fact, Jughead sitting on Santa’s lap, which is a thing he’s sure neither he nor Santa wants. But he does somehow wind up in a picture _with_ Santa, perching awkwardly on the arm of Santa’s throne-like chair while Betty—or, rather, Gingersnap—sits in Santa’s lap in his stead. Kevin grins from inside the photo booth, waving a teddy bear and yelling at them both to look at it and smile. 

“You can still tell me what you want for Christmas, young man,” Santa informs Jughead solemnly. 

Everyone—Santa, Betty, Kevin, probably four other elves he’s unaware of—is watching him. 

“Peace on earth, goodwill towards men,” he says. 

Santa pats him on the knee. “That’s a very admirable sentiment.” 

He waits a couple of minutes for Betty to change into normal clothes. As they fight their way out of Macy’s, which is apparently going to be packed until it closes at midnight, Jughead realizes that the sound system has finally, mercifully, stopped playing “Wonderful Christmastime.” 

It’s moved on to Mariah Carey. 

“All I want for Christmas is you…” he hears, from high above and from just in front of him. That would be Betty, singing along softly—and unconsciously, he thinks—as she reaches in her coat pockets for her gloves. 

On their way home, she explains that this particular Santa is known as Santa Santa, that he refuses to tell anyone his real name, that he’s been working at Macy’s for years and no one has ever seen him out of costume.

“He told me he lives at the North Pole and he comes to Macy’s on a sleigh every morning.” 

“You’re writing all of this down, right?” Jughead asks. “For future publication?” 

“I’m not much of a personal essayist.” Her eyes twinkle even in the subway’s fluorescent lighting, and it’s unfair, really, how goddamned beautiful she is. “But yeah, of course.”

  
  
  
  


When he stumbles into the kitchen the next morning, Betty’s already gone. As usual, she’s left him half a pot of coffee.

Today, that’s not the only thing she’s left. 

Hanging on their fridge, just above the picture of her family and surrounded by a cardboard candy cane frame, is the picture Kevin took last night.

  
  
  
  


(to be continued…)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know everyone is busy this time of year, but it would be much appreciated if you would leave a comment!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy holidays, everyone, regardless of what you celebrate!

The box is red. It has red and silver candy-cane stripes, a forest green velvet bow, and a tiny square card in a cream envelope on top, tucked under the ribbon. The envelope says, simply, “Jughead.” 

Their apartment has no tree. It has no decorations at all, in fact, save for their Santa photo and a poinsettia that arrived via florist the day after, courtesy of Veronica Lodge. Betty had put the poinsettia on the coffee table, and then either last night or this morning—while Jughead was asleep—she’d gone and put a present for him next to it. Even though they’ve barely spoken in the last three days, what with him accidentally seeing her naked and all. 

Regardless of the fact that it’s six-thirty in the morning, he suddenly feels like he needs about five cheeseburgers to deal with this. 

It’s not as though Jughead objects to getting his roommate a Christmas present; Santa only knows how much she deserves one. He just doesn’t know what that present should be. 

Everything he can think of—everything he _has been_ thinking of, since long before this box with his name on it appeared on the coffee table—is either impersonal or, well… inappropriate. She’s been run off her feet in Christmas retail hell for the last month; what she deserves is a nice night out, a decent dinner she doesn’t have to cook for herself, a pedicure and full-body massage. 

Everything he can think of screams _boyfriend_ , which he is not.

  
  
  
  


Only rarely has Jughead wished for someone with whom he might talk about these sorts of things, whatever these sorts of things are. He never went through a girl-crazy phase, preferring to mostly watch from the sidelines as Archie earnestly flailed his way through a semi-disastrous high school run of girlfriends that extended into college before he crashed headlong into Veronica Lodge and slammed on the brakes. 

And therein lies the problem with confiding in Archie: he knows that no matter how ardently Archie might swear to keep all confessions in the strictest confidence, there’s no way Veronica wouldn’t pry everything out of him without even really trying. And Veronica, well-meaning as he knows she is, would never be able to resist calling her own best friend at once…

There’s also the thing where they have a _really good_ living situation going on, one that he doesn’t want to ruin; the mere thought of finding another apartment is enough to tie his stomach in knots (and he would be the one who’d have to move out; Betty’s parents are the ones who nabbed them a slight discount on the deposit by co-signing their lease). So really, his best option is just to sit and wait and hope his feelings dissipate before he loses the ability not to act on them. 

Maybe they’ll dissipate over Christmas, when he’ll neither see nor speak to Betty for a week or so. He only has to last a few more days. That’s completely doable. On the morning of Christmas Eve, he’ll go to Toledo and she’ll go to Riverdale, and when they come back, he’ll be normal. 

That’s what he tells himself, anyway. After he accidentally sees her naked. That’s what he tells himself after he accidentally sees her naked. 

And, since they basically don’t speak to each other for the next few days, it almost works. But then—then she gives him a Christmas present.

  
  
  
  


He leaves the box on the coffee table, but nudges the tiny envelope out from under the ribbon. The envelope’s flap is unsealed, and he pulls the card out partway, wondering if he’s supposed to open this now or later. 

“Merry Christmas,” she says from somewhere behind him, and he damn near jumps through the roof. 

“Betty.” He turns around to see her in the hallway, her eyes fixed on the card in his hands. “I thought you’d left already.” 

She shakes her head, sending her ponytail swishing. “There’s been a little family drama this morning.” 

“Family drama?” Needing something to do with his entire body, all of a sudden, Jughead puts the envelope down and enters the kitchen, where he begins making a pot of coffee. _Family drama_ means something very different to Betty than it does to him, he’s sure. 

“Yeah. Polly just called. She and my mom got into some huge fight last night, I have no idea why, and so she and Jason decided to spend Christmas with his family instead. They’re driving up to Montreal right now.” 

“I thought Jason’s parents lived right outside Riverdale.” 

“They do, but they always spend Christmas in some fancy hotel up there.” She walks to the front door and starts bundling herself up, starting with the snow boots. “So Polly’s going to be gone the entire time I’m up there, and then my mom just called and _she’s_ in a rage—like, at Polly, but Polly’s not taking her calls so she decided to take it out on me, and… well, now she’s threatening to cancel Christmas completely, and I’m late for my last day as an elf.” 

Betty jams her usual blue beret on her head—she’s been leaving her costume in a locker at Macy’s the past few days—and sighs deeply. 

“Betts, are you okay?” 

She nods, despite the fact that the addition of her scarf and bulky coat has made her look smaller, not larger, and that clearly the only thing coming between her and an onslaught of tears is an astonishing amount of willpower. 

“I’m fine,” she says, with unconvincing cheerfulness. “It’s just a lot at once, you know? My parents are crazy, I don’t know when I’m going to see my sister again…” Her eyes flicker, ever so briefly, to his. “I’m pretty sure the boy I like doesn’t like me back. But I’m fine. I’ll be fine.” 

The door clicks shut behind her, leaving Jughead standing in the kitchen, empty coffee mug in hand, staring blankly after her like the moron that he is. 

There’s a boy. Of _course_ there’s a fucking boy.

  
  
  
  


Since his semester officially ended, he’s had all the time in the world on his hands—at least until about three o’clock tomorrow morning, at which point he’s due at Penn Station to begin his twelve-hour Christmas Eve Greyhound bus ride to Toledo. Today, except for the inevitable and necessary task of packing, is no exception. His Christmas shopping has been more or less complete for a while, such as it is: the box of chocolates for his mom, assorted New York and NYU-themed mugs for everyone else on his very short list, plus a bag of the most relentlessly hipster dark roast he could find for J.B., who’s only just discovered coffee but has already sworn off Folgers. 

Most of this time has been spent either reading, wandering aimlessly, or catching up on sleep, but this morning Jughead allows himself five minutes of despondent staring while he waits for his own coffee to brew. 

Once the brewing cycle is complete and he has coffee in hand, he arranges himself uneasily on the sofa, picks up the tiny envelope again, and pulls out the card. It starts, predictably enough, _Dear Jughead_. He quickly scans over the rest of Betty’s words, his heart rate increasing with every neatly inscribed letter, until he reaches the end. 

Jughead folds the card shut, puts it back in the envelope, and cautiously undoes the wrapping paper to reveal a Macy’s box. Inside that box, he finds a deep blue sweater for which he can find no adjective other than _beautiful_. He pulls it from the box; it’s so soft and silky to the touch that he knows at once it cannot have been cheap even with her employee discount. 

He pulls the card out again, reads over her words again, from the _Dear Jughead_ at the beginning to the _Love, Betty_ at the end, then goes back another time to the dead center of the card and the single word _adequate_. Finally, after his fourth or maybe fifth or possibly even sixth read-through, the truth he’s been circling around settles into place. 

_He’s the boy_.

  
  
  
  


He’s probably the boy.

He’s possibly the boy. 

He’s definitely not losing confidence that he is the boy with every step he takes in the direction of Macy’s, in the direction of Betty. The words _what if you’re not_ are definitely not roaring through his brain so loudly that they’re blocking out everything around him—the regular cacophony of the subway, the rush of wind as he hits street level, the inevitable strains of “Wonderful Christmastime” as he shoves his way to the store’s front doors. A clump of half-melted snow drips onto his head before he can quite get under the awning, and he swipes his hat off, shaking it out before shoving it in his coat pocket. 

Macy’s is open for business already, but SantaLand isn’t, yet. 

Jughead catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror-lined escalator well, and is momentarily struck by the fact that he ought to have put on the blue sweater for this mission, or at the very least tried a little harder than yesterday’s road-salt-encrusted jeans and a hoodie thrown over the t-shirt he’d worn to bed last night in his haste to get here. 

But that doesn’t matter right now. This is his airport moment, the bit at the end of the movie when the hero (oh, god, is he the hero?) rushes to declare his true feelings before the heroine boards the plane. It doesn’t matter right now that neither of them are getting on a plane, or that he’d be seeing Betty in twelve hours or so anyway. All that matters right now is _telling her_ , consequences be damned. 

At the top of the last escalator, it occurs to Jughead that he also ought to have brought flowers, or something. 

“I’m sorry, sir, we don’t open for another fifteen minutes,” says a small female elf, one who looks even more tired and bedraggled than Betty has recently, and whose nametag reads “Sprinkles.” 

“I’m not here to see Santa,” he says flatly. “I need—my roommate works here. Betty Cooper. I need to talk to her.” 

“I’m afraid I don’t know any—”

“Gingersnap. Her elf name is Gingersnap.” 

Sprinkles’ brow furrows. “I haven’t seen Gingersnap today. Can this wait until her break, sir? I’m sure she’ll check her phone then.” 

Another elf appears from behind an enormous plastic nutcracker, and to Jughead’s immense relief, he recognizes this one. “Jingle Jangle,” he calls, not without embarrassment. 

Jingle Jangle raises an eyebrow as he saunters over. “Hey,” he says. “And—just Joaquin, seriously.” 

“Joaquin. Have you seen Betty? I need to talk to her.” 

The tiniest of smirks appears on Joaquin’s face, almost like he’s about to ask whether Jughead has finally come to his senses. But, to Jughead’s relief, all Joaquin says is “Hang on a sec.” He’s not sure he could handle that question coming from anyone at the moment, let alone an ex-gang member clad in an elf suit and currently going by “Jingle Jangle.” 

Of course, when Betty appears a few moments later, she’s wearing not just an elf suit, but the expression of someone who has successfully compartmentalized her morning and is not in the mood to reopen any unpleasant mental boxes she might have packed away. 

“Jughead. What are you doing here?” 

Now that she stands in front of him, he’s only half sure. 

“I…” 

A flurry of movement in the corner of Jughead’s eye alerts him to the fact that they are very far from being alone. Joaquin, Sprinkles, and now Kevin are all peering from behind the giant nutcracker, and a slow stream of parents and children has begun trickling from the escalators. 

“What, Jughead?” she says, and he swallows hard, hoping beyond hope he hasn’t screwed everything up before he’s even really started. 

He means to ask her if there’s somewhere more private they could go, but instead says “I opened it. The box.” 

Her expression shifts almost imperceptibly, from neutral to the tiniest bit anxious, and she grabs his arm. Suddenly they’re on the other side of a twelve-foot teddy bear, Jughead’s heart hammering away as Betty’s eyes sweep over his face and he realizes, fully, that he has _no idea_ what to say. 

“And?” Her voice is softer this time. 

“I just wanted to tell you… you’re wrong. What you said before you left this morning, I mean. I think… I think you’re wrong.” 

One corner of Betty’s mouth twitches slightly upwards. “That my parents are crazy and I don’t know when—”

“No,” he says, “the third thing,” and then he kisses her.

  
  
  
  


He’s the boy. 

How he’s the boy, _why_ he’s the boy, he doesn’t know. But he is, and that’s enough to keep him warm all the way back to their apartment, even when the wind picks up and starts flinging the day’s snow flurries right in his face. He’d opened his eyes a fraction of a second before Betty did, pulled back just enough to for her features to slide into focus. It’s an image he’s determined to keep in mind for the rest of his day, for the rest of his _life_ : Betty’s still-parted lips curled into a delicate and impossibly lovely smile; the skin of her jawline slightly indented under his fingers; her nose, which had just brushed against his, tipped upwards. 

“Juggie,” she’d breathed, barely. 

And then a freaking chorus of trumpets had blasted “Here Comes Santa Claus” right in their ears. 

“I have to go,” she’d said, and he’s holding onto that, too, the reluctance she’d put into those four short words.

  
  
  
  


She calls him back over her lunch break, which is absurdly scheduled at ten o’clock—by which point he’s already both elbows deep and way over his head. 

“What time are you done today?” 

“Five,” she says, “so I should be home around six. Why?” 

“Oh, no reason. Just—can I meet you there?” 

“Yes,” she says without hesitation, the slightest hint of smile in her voice. “Yeah, of course.”

  
  
  
  


This time, he puts on the blue sweater before he goes to Macy’s. It’s a brighter blue than he would ever choose for himself, but as his head pops out of the v-neck and he catches a glimpse of himself in the bathroom mirror, he realizes Betty knew exactly what she was doing. 

Then he puts his coat on, completely obscuring the sweater, and decides that while Betty might know exactly what she’s doing, he does not. She’ll see it when he takes the coat off, at least, which he supposes is good enough. 

He adds his hat to the ensemble, but only because it’s still snowing.

  
  
  
  


“Where are we going?” Betty asks as they wait on the subway platform, arm in arm. “Unless it’s a big surprise.” 

“It’s definitely not,” he says. “We’re going home. I kind of figured you’d just want to crash.” 

He doesn’t think it’s his imagination that Betty looks, somehow, simultaneously disappointed and relieved. “Netflix and chill?” 

“If that’s what you want.” 

She nods, and Jughead lets himself smile a little. 

“Good,” he says. 

It’s not as though he hasn’t planned something resembling a date. He’s just planned it for their apartment. Waiting behind the door are preparations for the one meal he’s confident he can cook (spaghetti and sauce from a jar), a little basket of bath stuff including those weirdly expensive fizzy balls that he’s pretty sure are going to stain the tub purple, and—in a move that he hopes isn’t _too_ much—an attempt at homemade gingersnaps.

  
  
  
  


By the time they’ve reached the fifth floor, Betty’s usually inexhaustible supply of energy is finally running low. Maybe, Jughead thinks—maybe this is the first time in a month she’s _let_ herself feel tired. The fatigue seems to hit her all at once, to the point that her eyelids are drooping as he pushes their door open. 

“It smells good in here.” She peers into the kitchen while Jughead takes his coat off. “Were you baking?” 

“I tried. I can’t vouch for the results.” 

“And you’re wearing the sweater.” Her hand comes forward, hesitantly, like she wants to touch it—touch _him_ —but isn’t sure she’s allowed. Finally, it lands on his upper arm; Jughead’s mouth goes dry as they both watch it drift slowly to his shoulder. “I knew that color would be good on you.” 

“Did you?” 

Betty nods, rather solemnly. “I have good taste.”

  
  
  
  


“I don’t want to go home.” By now they’re on the couch, snuggled together under their one lap blanket while _White Christmas_ plays, mostly unwatched, on the TV. A half-eaten plate of gingersnaps (surprisingly edible gingersnaps) rests on the coffee table, waiting to be wrapped for one or the other of their bus trips tomorrow. “I don’t want to deal with my mom alone.” 

For a wild moment, Jughead imagines himself saying _Come to Toledo with me_ , and her actually doing it. He’s sure the Greyhound bus will have seats left. But he knows Betty would never really abandon her family on Christmas, however tired she is of either them or the holiday. Besides, whatever he’s about to face won’t be any merrier. He can’t even offer her a place to sleep; his dad’s trailer has been sublet, and his mom and J.B.’s apartment doesn’t have a guest space, just the one couch that’s so uncomfortable not even he can really sleep on it. And what’s he going to do the day after Christmas, take Betty to prison to meet his dad? 

So he swallows down the offer and holds Betty a little tighter, breathing in the lavender that the bath bomb left on her skin as she plays idly with the cuff of his sweater. There are so many things he wants to ask her—why him, for a start, and since when?—but he’ll wait, he thinks, until after the holidays. Until they’re on a real date, somewhere outside their apartment. 

His mind flashes back to the phone conversation he’d overheard, and her lament to Veronica that she had no hot guy to give her a massage. Whether or not he counts as a hot guy is not a question he much cares to ask himself, but he figures proximity counts for enough, so he slowly slides the hand that’s been around Betty’s waist around to her back, and starts doing his best with what he can reach. 

“Oh, my god,” Betty groans, shifting to give him better access. “That’s amazing. Don’t ever stop.” 

He doesn’t. He pauses, though, when she shifts again and the movement causes her t-shirt to ride up the slightest bit, exposing an inch or two of bare skin on her back. 

“Can I, uh…” Jughead means to finish the question, he does, but that strip of skin is a warm, soft, irresistible magnet, and his fingers are already sliding further under her shirt. 

Betty nods. “It feels better that way,” she says, and a minute later, “I should just take the shirt off; you’ve already seen everything.” 

He pauses again. 

“I’m kidding, Juggie.” Betty twists her head around to look at him, a little smile on her lips, and he realizes she really was teasing him. 

“I wouldn’t object, you know,” he tells her, as his fingers find a knot under one shoulder blade. 

“You looked like you wanted to throw up at the time.” 

“Trust me, that’s not what was going through my mind.” Experimentally, he presses on the knot, and Betty moans. “Good?”

“Adequate,” she says, suddenly drowsy again. “It’s adequate.”

  
  
  
  


They don’t move from the couch until after one in the morning, when it’s time for him to leave for the bus and he’s forced to nudge her awake. 

“No,” she mumbles. “I’m comfortable.” 

“I have to go.” 

Betty sits up, blinking slowly. “When did I fall asleep?” 

“A few hours ago, I think.” He stretches, causing his back to pop in about four places, and internally groans at the thought of his impending twelve hours on a Greyhound. 

“No,” she says again. “I wanted to—you know, spend time together before you left.” 

Inside his chest, Jughead’s heart grows another two sizes. “I’m coming back in a week, you know.” 

“I know. You live here.” She takes his hand in hers, rubs the pad of her thumb over his knuckles, and looks up at him. “Is it too stupid to say I’ll miss you?”

  
  
  
  


He collects his duffle bag from under the bus and shuffles into the terminal with everyone else, veering to the side when he spots a tall, dark-haired teenager in an old plum-colored beanie waving at him from the corner. The bus had been warm, so warm that he didn’t bother putting his coat back on before disembarking. 

“Nice sweater,” J.B. says without preamble, lacing the words with her usual undercurrent of affectionate sarcasm. “Your girlfriend pick that out?” 

Much to his own surprise, Jughead’s immediate reaction is to _grin_. “Yeah, actually, she did.” 

“Whoa.” His little sister raises an eyebrow. “You’re inventing girlfriends now? This I’ve got to hear.” 

“Buy me a burger and I’ll tell you.” 

“Tate’s?” she asks, as though there’s a question as to whether or not they’d go anywhere other than Toledo’s finest retro diner. 

“Tate’s,” he agrees. 

_My sister thinks I’m making you up_ , he texts Betty. A few minutes later, she responds with the one picture they have of the two of them together—the one that, unfortunately, includes Santa. He shows it to J.B. anyway, who regards his phone with a healthy dose of skepticism. 

“You’re dating an _elf_?” She slides the phone back across the table, and he shoves it in his pocket. “God, New York’s changed you.” 

“Maybe,” he concedes. “But… for the better, I think?” 

He doesn’t mean for it to come out as a question, but it does anyway, the words hanging over the chipped Formica tabletop until J.B. swats them away with her hand. 

“Obviously for the better,” she says, somehow looking both older and younger than her seventeen years. “You actually seem kind of happy.” 

“Yeah.” He stares out the window for a moment, at the dreary gray Ohio sky, and wonders once again how the hell he ever got out. If getting out will, possibly, prove permanent. “I think I am.”

  
  
  
  


(fin)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look, I'm promising nothing, but... would I be me, if I didn't have ideas for a fourth chapter? Would I?
> 
> (I would not.) 
> 
> (I'm promising nothing, though.)


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we're back. Happy Galentine's Day, Syl? 
> 
> This isn't exactly the fourth chapter I'd hinted at writing previously; that chapter was supposed to be themed for the week between Christmas and New Year's, and, well, I never got to sit down and write it at a seasonally appropriate time. But it's Valentine's Day now, and what better time is there to bring back the hey-they're-adults-here fluff?

Her lingerie is pink. She wears pink lace boy shorts, a matching pink push-up bra, and a silky pink robe that ends at mid-thigh. 

Betty Cooper studies herself in her full-length mirror. 

The lingerie isn’t new, exactly. She bought it almost eighteen months ago, both because it had been heavily discounted and because there was a boy she hoped would want to see her in it. The clearance-rack prices meant her totally unworn items were—like her affections for the boy, it turned out—nonreturnable. She’d tried to wear the bra and panties once, just so she wouldn’t feel as though the money had been totally wasted, but this wasn’t the sort of bra-and-panty set meant for all-day comfort. Since then, the pieces have been rolled up at the back of her drawer, waiting for an unknown special occasion. 

Tonight, Valentine’s Day, is finally that occasion. There’s a boy, now—one she suspects doesn’t particularly like Valentine’s Day, but one who she knows _does_ like seeing her in whatever underwear she happens to be wearing at any given time, and who likes taking that underwear off of her even more. 

Betty adds a layer of lip gloss to her usual minimalist makeup, fluffs her hair, and checks her text messages to confirm for the fifth time that the boy in question is definitely going to be alone when he comes home. Then she turns back to the mirror and tugs gently at the hem of the boy shorts, frowning slightly. She weighs, on average, three and a half pounds more than she did eighteen months ago, a number she’s managed to convince herself is entirely inconsequential—except when lace is stretched ever-so-slightly too tight across her upper thighs, apparently. 

She cinches the robe shut around her waist, smooths out the collar, and takes one final look before she heads to the kitchen. 

_Screw the three and a half pounds_ , she thinks. Jughead is going to _love_ this.

  
  
  
  


The first time she sees _him_ naked is December 30th, the night he gets back from Toledo. Betty had returned to New York three days earlier, unable to bear being stuck alone in the Riverdale house with her parents for any longer than that. She’s been positively relishing the time she's had alone since then, and the raging snowstorm that feels like an excuse to do absolutely nothing but snuggle under blankets with a good book and some hot chocolate. 

But by the end of the third day she’s out of marshmallows, and feeling both more than a little stir crazy _and_ inexplicably nervous that someone will have forgotten to plow and salt all the roads leading from Toledo to Penn Station, thus leaving Jughead’s bus unable to get in. He’s been texting her updates all the while and she knows he’s right on schedule, but there’s still a little knot of anxiety in her stomach when she disappears underground into the subway and loses service, one that doesn’t dissipate until the little bars reappear on her display and bring with them a message that just says _Fifteen minutes_. 

It’s silly, really, how giddy the sight of his messy hair escaping from under that old gray beanie makes her feel. It’s silly how much her heart swells when he notices her standing off to the side, freezes in his tracks for half a second, and breaks into a delighted little grin. 

She waits to the side while Jughead grabs his duffle bag, heart fluttering lightly in her chest, and wonders whether they’re at the kissing-in-public stage of their relationship yet. 

Jughead doesn’t seem to have a clear answer on that either. “I didn’t think you were coming to meet me,” he says, and they both just stand there for a moment until he ducks down and kisses her on the cheek. 

“Why wouldn’t I?” 

“Because there’s a snowstorm?” 

She shrugs. “Yeah, but I missed you.” 

They grab dinner at a sub shop in between the bus terminal and the subway line, and then—then they go home.

  
  
  
  


Betty’s well aware that everything about her everyday look—from her ponytail to her minimalist eye makeup to her snug but conservative sweaters—tends to make people imagine she’s as innocent as she looks; that she must be, as more than one charming asshole has put it (to her face, even), a “naïve prude.” 

She is not. 

She’s certainly not as experienced as _some_ girls (like, for instance, Veronica, whose pre-Archie exploits were downright legendary), but she likes to think any lack of experience on her part is because she’s particular. Picky, even. 

What that means right now—as she locks the apartment door behind them and strips off her boots and outer layers—what that means right now is that it’s been a very long time. 

She waits until Jughead’s taken off all of his outerwear, snow-covered hat included, and then she can’t wait any longer. 

“What?” she asks when Jughead pauses five or ten or fifteen minutes later. A slight throbbing in her mid-back alerts Betty to the fact that their tiny kitchen counters were perhaps not designed for foreplay. She chooses to ignore it. “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, I just…” He studies her for a moment, and she wonders what he sees. “We’re not moving too fast?” 

She bites her lower lip, takes a breath, takes control of herself. “Do you think we are?” 

It seems like a silly question to her, considering how little has happened; they’re both still fully dressed. Still, she reminds herself, they’ve only been quote-unquote dating for a week, and less than twelve hours of that time has been spent in each other’s company. 

“What is it that you want, Jughead?” 

“I want whatever you want,” Jughead tells her, the seemingly chivalrous statement undercut just the _tiniest_ bit by the arrival of his thumb under the hem of her sweater, on the bare skin of her stomach.

 _I wanted to do this a month ago_ , she thinks, her mind flashing back to their small Thanksgiving dinner together, to the first time she’d looked at her roommate and thought, clearly and specifically, _I **really** like you_. Afterwards, she’d decided all the pieces involved in really liking him had been there, lingering, for quite a while. She had noticed Jughead was kind of cute the very first time they met, and she’d realized he was secretly and kind of inexplicably hot the first time she’d caught a glimpse of him going from the bathroom to his bedroom in only a towel. She knew they’d been getting along well as roommates, and she knew enjoyed his company on the occasions—the increasingly frequent occasions—that he spent time out of his bedroom, and then he’d called her cooking adequate in a way that somehow made the word mean so much more, made all the pieces fall into place. 

She tilts her head a little now, regarding him from her perch near the toaster oven, and removes her hands from his shoulders for just long enough to pull her ponytail loose from its elastic. 

The problem with looking like a naïve prude, Betty has discovered, is that sometimes people can’t quite deal with the fact that she tends to know _exactly_ what she wants. 

(Once she told a boy she’d been dating for a few weeks that she wanted to go down on him, and he’d laughed.) 

(She will not think about that right now.) 

“I want all of you,” she says. “Tonight.” 

For just a moment, the air seems to still. Jughead’s lips part slightly. He takes a single breath, and then she feels his thumb twitch against her skin. 

No one has ever removed her shirt so efficiently. 

They don’t talk much after that; words, frankly, don’t feel necessary, aside from a quick _yes_ or _there_ or _more_. Betty feels herself suddenly aloft, cool air against her bare back, and realizes she’s being carried to the sofa. Her landing is none too gentle, but considering how hard she’s tugging Jughead’s torso to hers, she figures that’s mostly her own fault. They wrestle awkwardly out of jeans and socks, and then, as she’s straddling his lap and just about to wriggle her fingers under the waistband of his boxers, Jughead’s fingers close over her wrist. 

“Should we…” He glances down the hallway. “Bed?” 

Betty drops her head slightly as she considers. The only good reason to relocate is that as far as she knows, neither of them keep condoms in the living room. 

“My place or yours?” she says, and Jughead grins.

  
  
  
  


She wakes up the next morning to the smell of coffee, alone and tangled in Jughead’s plaid flannel sheets, entirely nude and just a little bit sore. A glance at his bedside table reveals very little other than the odd fact that he doesn’t seem to own a clock. 

The thing to do, she supposes, would be to emerge in their combination kitchen/living room area wearing her own panties and one of Jughead’s discarded shirts. But a quick glance around the room reveals that there _aren’t_ any dirty shirts handy. Nor are there any clean ones in sight; he obviously did laundry before leaving for Christmas. 

(On top of which, if she’s being honest with herself, she does not want to put on yesterday’s panties.) 

She ducks nude across the hallway into her own bedroom, grabs her fluffy pink bathrobe from the back of the door, and emerges into the living area just as Jughead, clad in sweatpants and a clean t-shirt, finishes pouring coffee into two mugs. 

“Morning,” he says, sounding uncharacteristically nervous for someone who just got laid the night before. 

“Morning,” she replies.

They sit at the tiny dining table, knees almost touching. Betty curls her fingers around the edge of her coffee mug, but doesn’t drink. Jughead gets about three sips in before his fingers start tapping on the pocket of his sweatpants. When he moves his hand again, Betty can see the faint outline of something square in his pocket, something square with a ring in the middle of it. 

She makes very deliberate eye contact with him, then glances at the pocket and looks back up at him. 

They christen the sofa before the automatic timer on the coffee pot can even switch off.

  
  
  
  


New Year’s Eve finds them on the same sofa, waiting for the ball to drop with the remains of a frozen pizza and some chocolate chip cookies on the coffee table and a microwave heating pad on Betty’s abdomen. A bottle of cheap champagne bubbles, cork unpopped, in the fridge. 

“You want some more Midol?” Jughead asks when she twitches. 

Betty shakes her head. She’s comfortable here with her head on a pillow in his lap, or at least as comfortable as she’s likely to be with this level of menstrual cramps. 

“I don’t want to move.” 

He rubs idly at the back of her neck with one as midnight approaches, runs the other hand under her shirt and leaves it there, warm against the ache in the small of her back. 

“Three,” yells the world outside, and even though kissing Jughead means moving, she doesn’t care to wait any longer.

  
  
  
  


After two solid days of pleading, Jughead lets her read the first draft of the short story he wrote over Christmas. 

“It’s supposed to be kind of a deconstruction of the idealized American family,” he tells her when he hands it over. “Which—yeah, no. If you can’t figure that out from reading it, I’m in trouble.” 

It’s rough. She sees Jughead all over it, in the narrator that’s him-but-not. She sees Salinger in there too, and Fitzgerald, and a healthy dose of Faulkner at the edges, Faulkner by way of—she assumes, anyway, having never actually done more than driven through bits of it—the American Midwest. At the center of his deconstructed family is a teenage girl, one who shares absolutely no traits with her other than blonde hair, but nevertheless feels so much like a funhouse mirror distortion of fifteen-year-old Betty that she has to stop and remind herself that there is no possible way Jughead could have read the diaries she kept before she started therapy. 

The story is not great. Not _yet_. But she can tell that it could be. She can tell that if it were, and she had read it at fifteen, she would have spent hours searching the internet for information about its author. 

“Well?” he asks nervously, when she’s put down the printout on their coffee table and taken a deep breath. He’s been pacing up and down the living room since she started reading. 

“It’s good,” she says. “But we need to talk about semi-colons.” 

His voice shifts from nervous to skeptical. “That’s what struck you most? Punctuation?”

“It’s one of the things.” She pauses for a moment, collecting her thoughts. “Okay. I know I’m not supposed to, like, inject the author’s biography into stuff, but…”

“But what?” 

“But _is_ this biographical? Did you date the girl next door when you were in high school?” 

He looks—if such a thing is even possible—simultaneously annoyed and amused. “Not like that,” he says. “I mean, literally, yes. I did date the girl who lived next door. But she wasn’t the—the archetype.” 

“She wasn’t the archetype,” Betty repeats. 

“You know I grew up in a trailer park, right?” he says bluntly. 

“Yeah…” She did, in fact, although—she realizes now—only because of something Archie had once said. 

“Well, the girl next door was a righteously angry five-foot-nothing firecracker with pink hair who was more sarcastic than I am, and dumped me when she decided she liked girls better.” 

“Wow. Okay.” _So nothing like me_ , Betty thinks, with a surprising sense of relief. “What happened to her?” 

“She never left Toledo,” he says, after a long pause. “Dropped out of community college after a semester, I think. She’s working at a tattoo parlor now.” 

“Are you still in touch?” 

He shrugs. “Not really. I run into her sometimes when I’m back there, though. Her grandpa still lives next door to my dad.” 

“Oh,” she says, and feels confused until Jughead plops down on the couch next to her with a deep sigh. 

“So about these semi-colons.” 

“I can’t be the first person to have told you that.” 

“You’re not,” he says, somewhat ruefully. “All right. Let me have it.”

  
  
  
  


Bubbles, unfortunately, have to pop sooner or later. 

Betty’s only lasts until she starts her new job the next Monday. Relieved as she is to be back at some semblance of a desk in an office instead of on her feet in Santa’s Workshop, dressed in normal clothes instead of a green elf costume, and not dealing with an overstressed general public, well… 

It turns out that there _is_ something to be said for coming home at night so physically exhausted that your brain doesn’t have enough energy to run at warp speed. It turns out that there _is_ something to be said for work that stays at work instead of following you home at night. 

“I’m already pretty sure it’s not what I want, long-term,” she tells Veronica on their usual Thursday phone call. Usually Betty waits to call until she’s home from work, but today she’d dialed Veronica’s number as soon as she got off the subway, unable to wait any longer to vent. 

“Well, what do you want long-term?” Veronica asks, in her completely reasonable way. “I’m sure we can find a suitable position somewhere for you. Daddy would be thrilled to have you back, you know that.” 

It’s not the first time that Veronica has made her such an offer. She had been naïve enough to accept it once during their undergrad years, and though she didn’t exactly come to regret taking a summer internship that paid her enough to keep her in the city, she’d seen enough to know that—much as she loves Veronica—Lodge Industries is not a place she wants to be. 

“Thanks, V,” she says, as she always does. “But I need to figure this out on my own.” 

“Well, the offer stands.” After what wouldn’t count as a long pause for anyone but Veronica Lodge, Betty hears a very loaded, “ _So_.” 

“So what, Veronica?” she sighs. 

“So you and Jughead?” 

She enters the apartment to the smell of spaghetti sauce and garlic bread, and a more than a slight undercurrent of something burning. 

“That would be the meatballs,” Jughead informs her from the kitchen, where he’s up to his elbows in soapy dishwater. 

“You made meatballs?” 

“Well, not from scratch.” He inclines his head towards a plastic bag. “They’re frozen. They _were_ frozen, I should say.” 

“And now they’re…” 

“Charcoal,” he says grimly. 

She crosses the few steps over to the kitchen area and plants a little kiss on his cheek. “Thank you,” she says. “I’m fine without meatballs.” 

“I feel like I should be more capable of following microwave instructions.” 

“They were probably for the whole package. If you’re only cooking part of the bag, you don’t need to put them in as long.” She peers into the sink. “And we should probably just let that soak for a while.” 

Jughead nods, fills the dish with fresh soapy water, and rinses the bubbles from his hands. 

“And maybe open a window,” she adds.

  
  
  
  


Her mother comes to visit at the end of January, followed by Polly the next weekend. They tell Polly they’re together and she sleeps in Jughead’s bed for the weekend. To Alice they say nothing, and Betty sleeps on the couch. 

“It’s her, not you,” she tells Jughead. He says he understands, and she hopes that’s true. 

Less than five minutes after her mother leaves, she rips the sheets from her bed, wipes the room down from top to bottom (even though she had done exactly that just before her mother arrived), and lights every vanilla-scented candle she can find. 

Jughead pokes his head in the door as she’s frantically Swiffering under the bed, takes a deep breath, and coughs. 

“I thought burning sage was more traditional,” he says, once he’s recovered. 

Betty winces. 

“What?” 

“My mother’s actually been known to do that,” she says. “Like when Polly and Jason first started dating—which was their junior year of high school—she didn’t think his intentions were honorable, so she burned sage in all the rooms every time he came over.” 

Jughead winces too.

  
  
  
  


“You really don’t have to come to this,” Jughead tells her for the fifth or sixth time. 

“Why wouldn’t I want to go?” They’re already on the subway, so unless Jughead expects her to hang out at Starbucks by herself for a couple of hours, she’s definitely going. She’s even dressed mostly in black for the occasion. 

“It’s a _department mixer_. I don’t even want to go.” He tugs his hat down more tightly over his ears. “This is going to be miserable.” 

“Well, with an attitude like that…” She tries sending a cheerful smile at him. “And I do want to go. I want to meet all these people you keep complaining about.” 

“It’s not going to be fun,” he warns her, again not for the first time, and suddenly her insides lurch in a way that has nothing to do with the motion of the train car. 

“Do you not want me there?” She knows that underneath his coat, he’s wearing the sweater she bought him for Christmas; surely he wouldn’t have chosen that particular garment if he hadn’t wanted her to come. “I know I’m not the grad school type, but—”

Confusion flashes on Jughead’s face. “What? Betty, no. You’re smarter than anyone in the entire program, trust me.” 

“So what’s the problem?” 

For now, he simply shakes his head. Once they’re above ground again, he laces their fingers together even though they’re both wearing gloves, keeping her pulled so close to him that her shoulder keeps bumping his arm as they walk. 

“It’s usually fine when I’m in class,” he says quietly. “But then other times, like these, it’s just, like… what do I even think I’m doing here, you know?” 

Her heart melts just a little. “Impostor syndrome. You have impostor syndrome, Jughead.” 

“Yeah, that’s putting it mildly.” 

“That’s normal,” she says, keeping her tone gentle. “That’s totally normal. You just have to ignore it.” 

He lets out a slow breath, which crystallizes in the winter air. Then he mutters, so softly she can barely hear him over the wind, “It’s not just over grad school.” 

She doesn’t figure out what _that_ means until they’re safely inside the wine bar and four different bearded twenty-somethings in sport coats and black-framed glasses openly (and, it must be said, inexpertly) hit on her. Three of them do so while she’s got her arm linked around Jughead’s. He takes it more or less in stride, but with every stupid joke along the lines of _how’d you trick this one, Jones?_ , she feels his guard going up just a little bit more. A little voice inside her brain whispers that this must be a weird jealousy thing, but somehow she knows that little voice is wrong. 

After the fourth bearded hipster jerk has made the requisite stupid joke, she politely but firmly drags Jughead into a dark corner to give him the longest, slowest, deepest kiss she thinks they can get away with in this semi-public, semi-professional setting. Then she tousles his hair a little at the edges, reapplies her lipstick, and presses her lips against the side of his mouth in a way she knows will make a tiny pink smear. 

Jughead looks a little bit pleased, but more confused; he has not, she concludes, picked up on the fact that several of the female twenty-somethings in odd thrift store sweaters and black-framed glasses have been trying to hit on _him_. 

“Too much?” she asks, tilting her head to one side. “I can wipe the lipstick off if you want.” 

“What I want,” he says slowly, “is to take you home _right now_.” 

Betty’s sure her entire body flushes red for reasons that have nothing to do with the one-point-five glasses of white wine currently coursing through her bloodstream. She licks her lips, then wraps an arm around her boyfriend’s waist. 

“You know what,” she says, “I think that can be arranged.”

  
  
  
  


“Betty?” he asks a few hours later, when she’s sated and sleepy and curled against his still-bare chest. 

“Hmm?” 

“Is this all… okay?” He squirms a little underneath her. “Like, if there was something different you wanted. You’d tell me, right?” 

“You’re kidding,” she says, realizing he isn’t only when his whole body goes rigid underneath her. “Oh, my god, Juggie. No. Is this about _sex_?” She pushes up on one elbow, uses the other hand to stroke his face while she studies his expression. “Because the sex is very adequate.” 

“It’s not _just_ the sex, it’s…” His brow is a little bit furrowed, his eyes a little bit clouded, and she wonders if it was a weird jealousy thing after all. 

“Is it those jerks in your program?” 

“No. No, of course not. Or—not in that way.” 

She waits. 

“This just doesn’t feel like my life,” he says quietly. “It’s too _good_. It feels like—like I don’t belong in this timeline. I shouldn’t even have made it to college, let alone grad school. It feels like any day now I’m going to open my eyes and find myself back in Toledo, wiping down counters at my dad’s bar for minimum wage.” 

He gives her a soft smile, one that’s so sad her heart almost breaks. 

“And then there’s you,” he continues, stopping the thought when Betty places a finger over his lips.

“Of course you belong here, Jughead.” She traces her finger across his cheekbone, kisses him—once, and firmly—and then nestles back against his chest. “Of course you do.” 

Jughead’s hand lands in her hair, which he strokes idly for a few moments. “Betty?” he asks again. 

“Yeah?” 

“Is it too soon to tell you that I love you?” 

“It better not be,” she says. “Because I love you too. And—”

He pauses halfway to kissing her, like he’s suddenly realized there might be a shoe about to drop. “And?” 

“And there’s only one timeline,” she whispers, willing it to be true—lest she wake up one morning to find herself in her own childhood bed, copy-editing her parents’ newspaper for slightly more than minimum wage. “Just this one. I promise.”

  
  
  
  


She waits on the couch, chilly in only the robe and lingerie, until she hears Jughead’s key turn in the lock. Then she jumps to her feet, tries to strike a pose, and feels immediately stupid. There’s no time to change her mind, though, because the door is already opening. 

“I’m home,” he says, voice full of concern. “What’s the—oh, my _god_.” With a soft thud, his messenger bag hits the floor. 

“I didn’t know what to get you for Valentine’s Day,” she says, shivering a little as Jughead approaches her. 

He slides a finger under the shoulder of her robe, then runs his hand down to the bow at her waist and gives the loose end a tug. The robe falls open, and she shivers again—though whether from cold or from anticipation, she isn’t quite sure. 

“Betty Cooper,” he says, tracing a soft line from her collarbone to her navel to the pink lace at her hip. “This is…” 

“Adequate?” she suggests, and Jughead smiles. 

“Yeah.” In that one move she’s come to love, he hoists her up and starts carrying her down the hallway, to one or another of their bedrooms. “It’s very adequate.”

  
  
  
  


.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I still have a whole hell of a lot of Jughead's-childhood-in-Toledo backstory head canon for this little 'verse, but now I really do think I'm done writing it into fic chapters. Do feel free to bug me about it on tumblr, though, if you like. I'm stillscape over there, too.
> 
> Thanks for reading, and as always, please leave me a comment when you get the chance!


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